In my redesign project, I collected data regarding the top 100 accounts on Instagram with the most followers. And then I grouped those accounts into different categories based on the account holders’ occupation. Turns out that most account holders are singers and soccer players. This is for revealing what do young people like on Instagram.
At first, I used word cloud to display the result. As you can see from the image link, word cloud would put the word with most records at the center, and word with more records looks larger. However, word with longer length, for example “Celebrity”, looks in similar size with “Soccer”, although celebrities have less records than soccer players. The reason for this confusion comes from words of different lengths that mislead the audience.
Later I changed this word cloud into packed bubbles, which used different sizes of circles to demonstrate the number of records of categories. With circles wrapping the word, we would not be as confused as before. Thus in my opinion, word cloud looks fancy, but is less useful to create a good visualization.
You can also check out the article here that detailed discussed pros and cons of word cloud for more information.
Thank you for this amazing quarter and thank you all!